Now is not the time to double down on propping up the fossil fuel industry- we need a 21st Century energy policy, not a 19th Century one... By pulling out of the Paris accord, the United States will cede political, technological, economic, and even moral power to other powers, be they the European Union or China. The only beneficiaries of such a policy change would be the fossil fuel oligarchs and their pet politicians.

In Switzerland, the first commercial atmospheric carbon capture plant just opened. There is an entire family of industries that can be developed to mitigate the climate change conundrum- it just requires political will and proper funding priorities to make it happen... and I don't think that the United States will be at the forefront of this revolution. The plane won't leave the ground, because we won't always have Paris:

The irony here is that even the oligarchs would benefit in the long-term by dropping their short-sightedness and reactionary politics.

UPDATE: Tengrain's take is that Trump wants to pull out of the Paris climate agreement in order to help Russia's petrochemical industry- I guess Moscow grifting Trump's Paris activism.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Memorial Day is a strange day here in the 'States. It's a day set aside for the remembrance of the glorious fallen on which many people go to the beach or drink beer with friends. I don't begrudge people their fun- Americans have the least amount of vacation time in the developed world, it's a rare day off for overworked, undercompensated people. Hey, I myself am going to meet some friends I haven't seen in a couple of months for lunch. Duty to friends is even more laudable than patriotism in these strange days, with a strange government in place.

As far as the true message of Memorial Day goes, I typically defer to Eric Bogle, who wrote the definitive song for the fallen soldier. What could I add to his incredible tribute? What could anyone?

Sunday, May 28, 2017

It's odd to be writing about this in the midst of what is a holiday weekend for most American workers, but things are going really well on the job. My yearly raise kicked in this month, with an adjustment retroactive to January, and I received my ten-year service award, along with an additional week of vacation. Yeah, things are going well for me.

Even better, a former co-worker who left the organization a year and a half ago will be coming back to work for us for twelve to twenty hours a week, as needed. He left when his wife transitioned from part-time to full-time work, giving us a full month's notice and working to the end of the busy season. I had a chance encounter with him in a supermarket last October, and he told me that he 'missed the place', which set in motion his return. I told him, 'come back on your own terms, and I will do what I can to accommodate you'. He stopped by this evening and we just shot the breeze for almost an hour... it's as if he never left, and I will be incorporating him into next month's schedule (necessitating a rewrite on my part). We get along famously, having similar values and similar attitudes- another of the guys in the department once told me 'when they hired him, they were hiring another you'. As an added bonus, when he went to the main office to fill out the paperwork for his return, he learned that our new boss' assistant (her position was created a couple of weeks ago in preparation for some major projects) and he knew a lot of people in common.

Even the day-to-day operations on the job are going really well. We have had a lot of visitors, the gift shop is doing a brisk business... things are just generally turning out well these days, and I am looking forward to a really great summer season.

Dr Stephens-Davidowitz opened his lecture by noting that, over the past eighty years, if researchers wanted to judge people's beliefs, they would conduct an opinion survey. The problem with that is that people lie to surveys. In a survey concerning sex and condom use, the participants lied about frequency of sex and use of prophylactics: extrapolating from survey data, the women's answers would indicate that 1.1 billion condoms would be used per year. According to the male respondents, 1.6 billion condoms would be used per year. Actual sales figures indicated that about six-hundred million condoms were actually sold the year the study was conducted. If frequency of sex had been extrapolated from the study and correlated with condom sales, there would have been far more pregnancies expected that year.

People lie to surveys, they also 'mess with' surveys for various reasons- in one recent survey, when asked the question 'What color is a red ball?', six percent of respondents answered 'green' and six percent answered 'undecided'. Screwing with surveys is a particular problem when teens are the participants. In a survey formulated to determine if adopted teens were more likely to drink than those who lived with their biological parents, more than half of the respondents who claimed to be adopted had not been. Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that it's fun to mess with surveys.

Internet searches are a different matter- Dr Stephens-Davidowitz likened Google searches to 'digital truth serum'. People are comfortable telling their browsers things that they don't tell other people. According to Google trends, searches for porn were more common than searches for weather reports among twenty percent of men and four percent of women. Search engines give users incentives to tell the truth... if one wants the results one wants, one must use the proper search terms to find them.

Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that Google searches revealed a lot of secret racism that was missed by polls. A map of racist Google searches correlates uncomfortably with a map of support for Donald Trump's candidacy. Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that the true divide when it comes to frequency of racist searches targeting African-Americans is not North vs South, but East vs West, with a higher percentage of easterners using racist search terms. It is pretty safe to say that racism is the number one factor in the ascendancy of Trump.

In another recent survey concerning sexuality, the highest percentage of men claiming that they are gay was in Rhode Island, with 4.8% of respondents answering in the affirmative. The state with the lowest percentage of affirmative responses was Mississippi, with 2.7%. In contrast, the percentage of Google users searching for gay porn was 5.3% in RI and 4.8% in MS. The numbers are similar everywhere. Among women, the search term 'Is my husband gay?' occurs ten times more frequently than 'Is my husband cheating?' and eight times more frequently than 'Is my husband depressed?' This query is most common down South.

Another survey indicated that there is a self-induced abortion crisis. With more and more states restricting legal abortions, desperate girls and women are using the search term 'How do I perform an abortion myself?' This search term exploded around 2011, just as the crackdown occurred.

In India, the top way to complete the search term 'My husband wants me to' is 'breastfeed him'.

Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that, if Google just confirmed analysts suspicions, it wouldn't be so revolutionary, but the unexpected results of trend analysis revealed secrets that the researchers didn't suspect. He wryly noted that this was a BIG WIN for science. In the case of the Indian Google search terms, none of the experts knew that about the breastfeeding fetish.

If Google is 'digital truth serum', Dr Stephens-Davidowitz said, Facebook is a 'digital brag to friends about how good one's life is'. People are even more dishonest on Facebook than they are on surveys. While the National Enquirer sells more copies than The Atlantic, on Facebook the latter publication gets mentioned with forty-five times the frequency of the former. The top terms women use to describe their husbands on Facebook are: 'best', 'best friend', 'amazing', 'greatest', and 'so cute'. On Google, the top terms women use in searches regarding their husbands are: 'gay', 'jerk', 'amazing', 'annoying', and 'mean'. Dr Stephens-Davidowitz gave us a good piece of advice- knowing the truth is better than not knowing, don't compare your Google searches to others' Facebook posts.

Learning of our biases can also be helpful. Parents are twice as likely to use search terms such as 'gifted' and 'genius' when describing their sons, while they are more likely to use the queries 'is my daughter overweight?' or 'is my daughter ugly?' than to ask that of their sons. While it is difficult to ask racist internet searchers not to be racist, it isn't that difficult to tell parents not to be biased.

In the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino mass shooting, the top Google search was 'kill Muslims'. There was an explosion of anti-Muslim rage, with other popular terms being 'I hate Muslims', 'Muslims are evil', and 'Muslims terrorism'. As searches using such terms rise, hate crimes rise. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Obama delivered a speech from the Oval Office in which he implored Americans:

“Just as it is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization, it is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination.”

While the speech was well-received by pundits, minute-by-minute the anti-Muslim searches skyrocketed. The media consensus was 'Nice job, Obama', while the search engines revealed rage and backlash. Later on, in the speech, President Obama noted:

“Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes—and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country. We have to remember that.”

Generations of Muslim Americans helped to build our nation. They were part of the flow of immigrants who became farmers and merchants. They built America’s first mosque, surprisingly enough, in North Dakota. America’s oldest surviving mosque is in Iowa. The first Islamic center in New York City was built in the 1890s. Muslim Americans worked on Henry Ford’s assembly line, cranking out cars. A Muslim American designed the skyscrapers of Chicago.

Rage and violence are important issues, but insane people were usually not studied... when people make crazy Google searches, what enrages them? Conversely, what calms them down? With search engine analytics, studying an angry mob is now a science, so a more effective approach to addressing violence can be formulated.

Dr Stephens-Davidowitz then opened up the floor to a lengthy Q&A session. Some bastard in the audience raised the specter of Rule 34 and, while the Good Doctor (shockingly, to me) wasn't familiar with the term, he assured us that it exists. In answer to one query, he made sure to note that data is neither good nor evil- the users choose to use them for good or ill... investigators use data to solve crimes, scammers use data to fleece consumers. Using data, corporations can target small sets of the population with advertisements. In answer to a question about people's ability to stop being honest on Google, he noted that, right after Edward Snowden's leak, embarrassing searches (including searches for 'Nickelback') slowed down. Regarding elections, Google searches are getting better, but it is still hard to predict elections. Politics being a sensitive area, searches tend to be bad- models must be based on data, not on people's responses to direct questions. Data gives us a deeper and richer view of people than the surface view that surveys provide.

In answer to a question about how individuals can use information to combat corporate dominance, Dr Stephens-Davidowitz did note that consumers can use internet searches to seek out lower priced goods, but that Big Data overall makes corporations more powerful. Google knows truths about you before your family does.

In 2004, Google users tended to be students or intellectuals, so searches about science were more popular by percentage of searchers. Now, the internet has a much broader user base. There has always been unseemly behavior, Dr Stephens-Davidowitz described it as 'a dark element of anonymous people doing horrible things'. Early on, internet searches concerning suicide often elicited deplorables urging 'do it', while later interventions in the search algorithms altered results to refer users to suicide prevention hotlines. Searches regarding 'child abuse' are more ambiguous, as older kids often do post-abuse searches, which can result in interventions by officials. When asked about a breakdown of internet users by age, Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that this can't be done, referring to Peter Steiner's famous 1993 New Yorker Cartoon: On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

When asked about the strangest American habit that he's learned about, Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that people google Google. He indicated that using Google Trends is a powerful way to put public data to use.

Another questioner asked him how to spot fake news, and Stephens-Davidowitz noted that conspiracy theories have been popular long before the Sandy Hook Massacre.

In answer to another question, Dr Stephens-Davidowitz noted that, while internet searches tend to correlate with offline activity, there can be holes in the dataset that don't play out- while searches for 'God' tend to correlate to the Bible Belt, the top result for Google searches for the word (at 2%) were related to the God of War video game franchise.

In order to mess up the data, one would have to be subtle- yahoos using Yahoo are at a disadvantage because searching for oppositional reasons merely indicates interest. There are pitfalls- one can cherry pick data, use of one strident word can have a disproportionate effect.

Dr Stephens-Davidowitz ended by addressing the ethical issues of data analytics, and whether companies such as Google should intervene when troublesome searches are made... does Google know when someone's doing something bad? He noted that a lot of people have horrible thoughts, but don't follow through on them. On the question of whether suicidal ideation correlates with suicide rates, he indicated that, while he was aware of 3.5 million searches about suicide, only four-thousand of the individuals followed through with killing themselves. While he encountered some disturbing revelations, such as the extent and effects of racism, he also encountered hopeful revelations- people's searches can verify some of the suspicions but allay other ones. For instance, while people are insecure about their own shortcomings, they are usually more forgiving of those of their partners.

The lecture was thought-provoking and entertaining- as someone who probably spends too much time on the internet, it was a nice overview of what really goes on in this crazy Series of Tubes. Here's a short media appearance by Dr Stephens-Davidowitz on the topic of 'Internet Truth Serum':

Accordingly, we shall indulge in rococo rodomontades of considerable loquacity and castigate oafs and varlets, blackguards and mooncalves. Let us woo demimondaines in the gloaming in verdant plaisances, plying them with choice viands and the chansons of Old Earth. Of greatest importance, let us avoid the snares and guiles of the deodands and hormaguants, venefices and jinxmen:

In the next diurnal round, I shall endeavor to scribe the sagacities of the scientists, but until then, I shall engage my tongue in the verbosities of Vance.

The life cycles of butterflies should be well known to any observers of nature- the transitions from egg to larva (caterpillar) to pupa (encased in a chrysalis or coccoon) to adult (imago) are well-documented, as any wag will tell you.

Of course, the centerpiece of the exhibit is a chamber kept at a humid 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26.67 Celsius) and chock full of Lepidopterans, with some particularly gorgeous Morpho butterflies seeming to dominate.

It was fun to see how different people react to the insects- one little girl was displaying some trepidation, while another loquacious girl not only reveled in the butterflies, but talked about them with any adult within earshot. As for myself, I love the things- I had one land on my hand, and was torn between reaching for my camera and not moving in order to prolong the contact. I also had the feeling of tiny legs crawling across the back of my neck, but all was good in the world because it was a butterfly and not some bitey or stingy thing.

After about a half-hour in the butterfly chamber, I realized that I was sweaty and needed a nice, cold drink. I exited out the 'airlock' style double doors, after a cursory inspection for stowaways, and proceeded to the less colorful, but no less magical, precincts of the museum.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

I have to say that I am not an Ariana Grande fan- I am a cynical man in his forties who really doesn't dig her brand of pop music. That is precisely why I am so horrified at the suicide bombing which killed twenty-two of her fans. The attack specifically targeted young people, particularly girls. The survivors of the attack, including Ms Grande herself, will carry a bit of survivors' guilt and a great deal of anxiety... something that I wouldn't wish on anyone, especially an adolescent.

There's a certain surreal quality to this particular tragedy, the role of social media in disseminating information about the fallen. The goofy selfies and whimsical photomanipulations culled from the kodds' various apps are jarring when contrasted with the stark crime scene images.

Around noon, I just had to get away from the media coverage- I headed down to the American Museum of Natural History to immerse myself in the butterfly exhibit. At first, it felt a bit unreal, standing in a warm chamber full of friendly people while enchanting, bejeweled creatures flitted around us... but then I realized that THIS was reality- the ideologies and theologies which lead a fanatic to murder children are unreal, not the marvels of nature. Then realization hit again, the beauties of the natural world are imperiled by human foolishness, just like the beautiful lives of children who just want to enjoy a night of music and joy. Solace achieved, solace abandoned...

I'm not an Ariana Grande fan, but I have friends whose children are, and that is precisely why the Manchester madness has me so angry.

Today, after locking up at work, I picked a mess of poke, which will be boiled tomorrow:

I also picked a bagfull of nettles, which pack a whallop of a sting, but have no toxins... though the mature, flower-bearing plants accumulate phytoliths, which can irritate one's urinary tract. I tend to parboil the nettles to kill the 'sting', though drying them has the same effect.

As the old maxim goes, the dose makes the poison, and even such commonly eaten plants as the ubiquitous red kidney bean and spinach contain toxins. The best way to deal with these toxins is to eat a variety of plants, which is pretty much what I get when I forage- I throw the miscellaneous greens together into a food processor and puree them into a green slurry, the composition of which varies as the foraging season progresses. Now, pokeweed will join the nettles and dock and garlic mustard and lambs' quarters and dandelion greens in the mix.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

I always joke that my job is pretty cushy, except when it's not. Today was firmly in the 'not' category. I left the job this morning after 4AM, and after running a couple of errands, got home after dawn. I ran into my next-door neighbor as he was walking his yellow lab, and we chatted for a bit about our respective jobs (he works at a medical center which has been taken over by a larger healthcare organization, so his job security is uncertain), and I turned in for the morning. I finally hit the mattress after 7AM.

At one minute to nine, my phone rang... one of my co-workers had left her work-keys at home, and had to have the site open for the first wave of visitors at 10AM. I hastily threw on some clothes and drove to the site. I never check my phone while I am driving- I am 100% against texting while driving, or reading while driving, or putting on makeup while driving, or doing anything but driving while driving, with allowances for a change of radio stations (my newish car has radio presets and volume control buttons on the steering wheel). At 9:25, my friend had texted me to tell me that one of our gift shop managers had arrived, and she has a set of keys for the site. As luck would have it, I never read this message, and when I arrived, I learned that the shop manager's key didn't work on the particular lock for the Visitors' Center. I seem to have one of the few master keys which actually works on every lock in the organization. If I had read the text message and turned around to return home, I would have received another text message a half-hour later, telling me to come back, and the place wouldn't have been ready for our ten o'clock tour.

When I got home at half-past ten, I ran into my next-door neighbor walking his lab for the second time of the day, and he did a double take... "You're not asleep?" My job is cushy, except when it's not, but when my people need help, I step up. Support your people, that's the most important thing to do in this life.

I had to be at my principle workplace again by 5PM. We had a low-key fundraising event today, and I actually wanted to attend for a bit, but the traffic was so horrendous that I had to take a roundabout route to bypass a couple of snarl-ups and arrived a mere five minutes before my start time. When I arrived, everything was lovely- we had some very nice visitors, some wonderful entertainers that have performed for our fundraiser for many years, and a cadre of my great co-workers. I like being on the job, and the curveballs that I occasionally get thrown (unexpected emergency phone calls, for instance, or four-day campouts without heat or electricity after a hurricane) are the dues that I pay for a generally easy-going job.

Just about the time I ordinarily lock up our visitors' center/gift shop, I received a frantic cry for assistance- one of my co-workers slipped on a floor tile in our basement and banged her chin on the ground. A couple of additional co-workers had arrived at her side before I did, and I told one of the young guys to run to the manager's office for a first aid kit. An alcohol wipe, a gauze pad, and a 2X4 adhesive strip, and she was patched up, but we had to ask her if she wanted us to get her to an emergency room. In a depressingly, uniquely American twist, she told us that she didn't want to go to the ER because she really couldn't afford the copay... A couple of us explained to her that, because her injury had occurred on the job, it would be covered by Workers' Compensation insurance. By this time, the manager had arrived, and I told him that I had to attend to the locking-up duties, leaving him to fill out the incident report.

My co-worker who fell is a fellow Yonkers resident. The manager, who is just about as solid a guy as you could ever meet, drove her home after we made arrangements for me to pick her the following day and bring her back so she could retrieve her car. I told her that I'd be working until 1AM, and that if she had any need to get to a medical center, she shouldn't hesitate to call me until about 2AM.

I was finally able to get a bit of a breather after 8PM, when I could settle into my comfortable routine. This day, which should have been a tad more busy than a normal Saturday, was characterized by bad luck, so it just d-r-a-g-g-e-d on. Of course, we'll all be laughing about it at the staff picnic in a couple of months, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't beat right now.

Meanwhile, the probe into collusion between the Trump maladministration and the Russian government is closing in on a senior Trump administration official even as Trump embarks on what promises to be his foreign embarrassment tour. With any luck, he'll decide to take refuge with the Saudis to escape the consequences of his actions. The Saudis notoriously gave sanctuary to Idi Amin, maybe they will do the same for Tweety Amin.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

A popular aphorism avers that only the good die young, so Roger Ailes death today at the age of 77 is ethically appropriate. Ailes was the midwife who birthed that particular Fox News brand of hard right politics and soft core pornography, a heady mix which was modeled on the Rupert Murdoch brand of sexual titillation and hypocritical moral outrage. Billy Bragg had the best commentary on this particular brand of yellow journalism:

Here in the States, the apotheosis of this paradoxical blend of umbrage and voyeurism was perhaps the 'expose' of Spring Break shenanigans complete with footage of young, scantily clad women. Never has moral indignation been accompanied by such hateboners... gotta sell that Cialis to the angry geezers.

Then there's the frathole atmosphere that Ailes fostered at the network, a vile miasma of sexual harassment and racial discrimination which comes as no surprise to those who have observed the constant belittling of women and minorities that was the network's stock-in-trade.

It came as a bit of a surprise that Ailes died so soon after his ouster from Fox, but his ghost will haunt the American brainspace for years to come, a ghost largely manifesting as a paranoia and hatred that seeped outward from Ailes' mind and poisoned vast swathes of America's population. If there is a single individual who could claim the title of worst American of the 20th century ever, Ailes would certainly be in the running for the title.

The first lecture by Dr Blaser that I attended concerned the human microbiome, with a focus on the role that the bacterium H. pylori plays in the gastrointestinal tract. The second lecture was a more generalized overview of the role of the microbiome on health, touching on such topics as the possible role played by antibiotic overuse/misuse in the world's growing obesity epidemic- it corresponded with the initial release of Dr Blaser's book.

Last night's lecture could be characterized to a 'greatest hits' compilation- it was a broad overview of the subject of the human microbiome and the role that antibiotics play in the relationship between us and our bacterial symbionts. Much of the talk revolved around the findings of the graduate students in Dr Blaser's lab.

Much of the lecture was involved with discussions of the role of antibiotic use in weight gain and possibly the onset of type 2 diabetes. While most of the experiments with mice involved sub-therapeutic levels administered over time, other studies mimicked the way in which people generally use antibiotics- pulses of high antibiotic use given to combat infection. Dr Blaser likened this to giving the mice antibiotics the same way parents would give antibiotics to a child with an ear infection. The 'pulsed' use of antibiotics early in life resulted in similar outcomes as the use of sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics.

Dr Blaser made sure to note that the development of antibiotics was a civilization-altering occurrence, and that the use of antibiotics has hugely benefited humanity. The study of the relationship between individuals and their bacterial symbionts is a relatively new field, and Dr Blaser and his team are on the cutting edge of it. Dr Blaser jokingly told an anecdote about he and his staff sending stool samples off to have genetic testing of the microbiota performed, and not knowing exactly how to interpret the results. Our internal symbionts have evolved with us over the course of millions of years, but our relationship is just beginning to be parsed out.

Dr Blaser devoted a significant portion of his lecture to the work of his colleges and students, presenting their achievements in succession with a palpable sense of pride. For a talk about germs and poop, there was a genuine sense of joy about the topic.

Dr Blaser devoted a considerable amount of time to a Q&A session- he knows that there is an intense public interest in his research and its health implications. There were a lot of questions about probiotics and ways in which to 'reboot' (perhaps re-butt) one's internal biota after a course of antibiotics. The topic of fecal transplants came up, with one wag in the audience (of whom I am jealous) referring to them as trans-poo-sions. One bastard in the audience asked if anyone had done research concerning the effect of antibiotic use on the onset of menarche, but Dr Blaser noted that lower ages for the onset of puberty predated the development of antibiotics by about a century, and should be attributed to overall improvements in nutrition.

All told, the lecture was wonderful- entertaining as well as informative. Dr Blaser has a remarkable knack for making his subject matter accessible for the layperson, something crucial when it comes to a topic as intimate as one's relationship with one's one trillion closest friends. Kudos to the good doctor, Margaret and Dorian, and the staff of Symphony Space... once again, the SSC has knocked it out of the park.

Here's a video of Dr Blaser lecturing on this topic at the American Society for Microbiology:

Monday, May 15, 2017

Over the weekend, a crowd of neo-Nazis descended on a Virginia town to protest the removal of Confederate memorials and conduct a totally-not-creepy torchlight procession. Among the slogans they chanted was the oldNazi standby "Blood and soil!" Of course, the soil that these sons of Europestood upon was stolen from Native Americans, and the blood that stained it was the blood of enslaved Africans... but these assholes would never acknowledge that, and "lack of melanin and trust funds" isn't much of a rallying cry.

I typed this out quickly on the phone while having a new tire put on the car (our roads are the pits these days), I'll clean up the linkage later.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Here's wishing a happy Mother's Day to all of the moms who read this blog. I made sure to call mom after things got quiet at work. She had my sister and her family, except for her oldest, who was hanging around college to attend some friends' graduation. Mom is doing really well, as always, and we talked for almost an hour, until my phone battery ran out.

Secondly, the Tor book club selection for the month is Vernor Vinge's amazing A Fire Upon the Deep. While I had been aware of the book for a while, I put off reading it until last year. While I am partially kicking myself for not reading it sooner, I am also glad that I put off reading the book for so long because the book is especially rewarding for readers who are aware of all science-fiction traditions. A Fire Upon the Deep is a one-volume distillation of the entire genre of science fiction, masquerading as a rip-roaring galactic adventure novel. Back in 1992, when it was published, I hadn't read enough of the genre to fully appreciate this trait of the book.

Before I go into a breakdown of the book's shout-outs to the genre, I have to get one thing out of the way- I certainly do not love the central trope of the novel... the notion that there are different Zones of Thought operating under different rules of nature. Yeah, I'm of the opinion that there's one reality, which permeates the universe, and things really only seem outrageous in the vicinity of black holes. In Vinge's fictional galaxy, the usual science-fantasy tropes are inverted: the Galactic Center is the 'Unthinking Depths', where sentience dulls and dies, and space travel slows to a crawl. The Slow Zone, where Earth lies, or lay in the distant past, is the next layer, where faster-than-light travel is impossible and artificial intelligence difficult to develop. The next layer, the Beyond, is where the whiz-bang space-opera stuff can occur, with faster-than-light travel and remarkable displays of sentience are the norm. Beyond the Beyond is the Transcend, where vast intelligences of great power (though typically of short lifespan) can develop. As one moves away from the core, one's potential increases, until a sort of demigodhood can be achieved.

The story starts out with a team of scientists working at the edge of the Transcend, who unearth an Eldritch Abomination straight out of a Lovecraftian cosmic horror tale. After releasing this malevolent power, the valiant scientists attempt to contain it while sending a husband-and-wife team to escape with the research facility's children to a planet closer to the Slow Zone, where it is hoped that their pursuer's vast puissance will be blunted. What follows is a disastrous First Contact, with the refugees falling into the hands of a bunch of fascistic religious fanatics and falling victim to the classic Simpson's Halloween episode gag 'your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons':

The aliens are doglike creatures which, while individually not very intelligent, can achieve an intellectual capacity equal to that of a human in groups of more than four individuals, but more than eight individuals lead to confusion. The individuals joining to form a group-mind communicate through sound, produced by a series of tympanic membranes. The initial protagonist of the story, an adolescent girl, dubs these creatures 'Tines', after the clawlike weapon that one of them uses to strike down her father... the name is an elegant one, though, as the individual creatures work in concert, like the tines of a fork, to produce one functioning entity. With a group intellect made up of a succession of individuals, the group intellects can last for hundreds of years. With his 'tines', Vinge, like Stanley G. Weinbaum created aliens that pass John W. Campbell's challenge: "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man."

Not all of the aliens are hostile- the human protagonists just had to fall into the clutches of the worst of the worst of them. Vinge introduces other witnesses to the spaceship's landing, ones motivated by curiosity, rather than fanatical rage:

"You're a pilgrim. You've traveled the world ... since the beginning of time, you'd have us believe. How far do your memories really go back?"

Given the situation, Wickwrackrum was inclined to honesty. "Like you'd expect: a few hundred years. Then we're talking about legends, recollections of things that probably happened, but with the details all mixed and muddled."

"Well, I haven't traveled much, and I'm fairly new. But I do read. A lot. There's never been anything like this before. That is a made thing down there. It came from higher than I can measure. You've read Aramstriquesa or Astrologer Belelele? You know what this could be?"

Wickwrackrum didn't recognize the names. But he was a pilgrim. There were lands so far away that no one spoke any language he knew. In the Southseas he met folk who thought there was no world beyond their islands and who ran from his boats when he came ashore. Even more, one part of him had been an islander and had watched that coming ashore.

He stuck a head into the open and looked again at the fallen star, the visitor from farther than he had ever been ... and he wondered where this pilgrimage might end.

What follows is a picaresque Planetary Romance, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Leigh Brackett, with the scriber and the pilgrim saving the strange, bipedal alien princess and whisking her off to the relative safety of an old friend of the pilgrim.

The novel follows several narrative arcs, each having different protagonists- there's the librarian who works at a central relay station of a vast galactic network reminiscent of the web in a cyberpunk novel by Gibson or Sterling, who teams up with a space-adventurer straight out of a Poul Anderson or Robert Heinlein space opera, rescued or reconstituted like Mary Shelley's monster from an ancient derelict spacecraft that had wandered perilously far into the Slow Zone because the crew fell victim to genre savvy, in order to track down the escape craft which had escaped the abomination.

Along the way, we have parallel plot threads, as the would-be rescuers evade pursuit while the stranded children learn how to interact with the alien natives, with suspense building as the reader is caught in the middle knowing that a major clash is inevitable. To heighten the suspense, there is an arms race, as one warring faction figures out how to use a child's laptop computer incorporated into a toy while another faction receives directions via FTL communication. There are strange aliens brought into sentience through cybernetic interfaces like the species in David Brin's 'Uplift' novels. The human population of the galaxy has spread through fits and starts, descents into barbarism and rediscoveries of space travel, reminiscent of the lost human colonies that Jack Vance wrote about. There are beautiful, xenophobic aliens who commit atrocities and brave space admirals who try to fend them off.

Vinge presents the reader with a head-spinning variety of cultures and concepts, with an occasional punch to the gut... oh, here's a loving couple who love their children and their friends' children so they do anything to save them and WHAM! Hey, nice star-sector spanning society of humans and aliens living in harmony, be a shame if something would happen to it... You really grew to like that character? WHACK! Oh, and his death is going to be a gut-punch to that other sympathetic character, and saddle her with a guilt trip.

The novel is a bildungsroman, a horror tale, a romance, a war story, a chase narrative, a picaresque, a thriller... it really does serve to tie the genre together. It's like a greatest hits medley that nevertheless remains original. I heartily recommend it, and will be following along with the 'book club' reading of it.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

A couple of nights ago, we had a visitor looking into the front window of our gift shop:

That handsome fellow is either a smallish bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) or a decent-sized green frog (Lithobates clamitans)- I didn't check for the dorsolateral ridges which would distinguish it as a green frog, not wanting to scare away a customer by getting too grabby.

Pretty soon, this critter will be in the pond doing its thing to perpetuate the species. Maybe it was shopping for a suitable gift for pitching woo.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Just a quick note before drinking beer- the news that Trump fired James Comey was a bit shocking, but not surprising- Trump, judging by yesterday's tweet-binge about former assistant AG Yates, and today's silence, Trump seems to be in cornered rat mode. Anyway, I hope Comey is glad about making a big deal about Hillary's emails. Don't trust GOPers, even if you are one.

The real issue now is Comey's replacement... the biggest crook in the country will be appointing the head of the FBI. Smart money says it'll be Jared Kushner... I wish I were joking.

Monday, May 8, 2017

To my knowledge, the first instance of an author killing off a character to prevent further appropriation by untalented hacks was Cervantes' killing of Don Quixote. Via Tengrain, we have the tale of Matt Furie killing off his Pepe the Frog character because it had been hopelessly corrupted by the Anime Nazi crowd. The problem here is that, unlike the knight-errant of La Mancha, Pepe as meme is much bigger than Pepe as character... for the record, Don Quixote is one of my all-time favorite books. Even more significantly, the crowd that co-opted Pepe is not exactly known for their respect for others' feelings, so they will probably carry on to spite Furie, who will be dismissed as a 'cuck' or a 'snowflake'. This isn't so much a funeral, but an uncontested divorce on Furie's part.

Rather than killing Pepe off, Furie should have sold the character off the Disney Corporation, which guards its intellectual property so fiercely that their lobbyists have fought to have copyright laws changed. A couple of lawsuits on the part of a deep-pocketed megacorporation, and the keks become mighty expensive.

The post title comes from one of my favorite Kinks songs:

Come to think of it, Pepe is a lot like the famous Disney rodent, a better example of graphic design than of interesting characterization... maybe Disney could have put his picture in the public bathrooms of their theme parks.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

I have come to the conclusion that the form of government of this country is rule by the stupid, which I will call morocracy. Via Tengrain, we have Idaho's Raul Labrador telling a bald-faced, idiotic lie:

Of course, his health insurance is paid for by the American taxpayers, so he never has to postpone needed care because he doesn't have the scratch. Why the hell do the idiotic voters in the Heartland keep voting for assholes like this? Do we really need to continue putting the absolute worst people in charge of our lives, and the destiny of our nation? Just thinking about this is enough to raise my goddamn blood pressure.

Friday, May 5, 2017

If you were to ask me which of my posts represented my pinnacle of snark, I would have to say that it would be my Cinco de Mao post, which hit on a whole host of right-wing calumnies against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. I'm chagrined that a troglodyte who actually believes those calumnies is the current resident in the White House. I miss the smart guy... I really do.

It's weird how the Trump Maladminstration decided to have the Vice President even acknowledge the day, even though his message rang hollow in the face of a long litany of lies about Mexicans promulgated by his boss. If I were a Mexican immigrant, I'd would not be reassured by Pence's assertion that Trump has made Latinos 'a priority'. Several conversations with Latino friends has convinced me that Trump making Latinos 'a priority' is the last thing that they want.

Most of the local Mexican-immigrant population in my neck of the woods is from Jalisco and Michoacan states, immigration from Jalisco starting in the 1960s, with Mr Taco being a local fixture since 1981. According to local legend, a politician vacationing in Guadalajara was so taken with his tour guide that he offered the man and his wife jobs if they were willing to emigrate, and they became the nucleus of the Mexican immigrant community.

Cinco de Mayo is a specifically Pueblan holiday. My go-to Pueblan informants are the guys who run the taco stand at 4th Ave and 9th St in Brooklyn, and I make a point of talking post-Trump politics with them whenever I leave the beautiful Bell House. Once, I asked the proprietor if he made the famous chicken mole poblano, and he laconically joked, "Sí, en mi casa." I'll be seeing him in three weeks, and I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about. He's a good hombre, like the vast majority of Mexicans who have immigrated to the United States.

NAFTA could have worked, if there had been provisions to raise the standard of living for the Mexican workers, the situation for the Mexican, American, and Canadian populations would be vastly better than they are these days. The problem is that the trade agreement mainly benefits the bad hombres who negotiated it.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Almost every college student who has ever attended a keg party is looking for sex or drugs, some sort of hookup. I say 'almost' because there's at least one frathole who dreamed of slashing Medicaid while attending keggers. Tragically, that frathole now has an inordinate amount of power to change people's benefits for the worse. While not throwing a kegger to celebrate the passing of Trumpcare in the House, even though the Senate will probably reject it, the GOPers have had cases of shitty beer delivered to the Capitol to celebrate their shitty legislation.

There's a certain banality to evil, and this Bud Light binge pretty much typifies it. Even though they are rich, and do the bidding of the ultra-rich, these people don't even have a scintilla of sophistication. They are men of wealth, but not taste. Let's hope that, as Nancy Pelosi suggested, they won't be around for a long, long year.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Crom, what a dumbass! There's a fake historical marker on the grounds of a Donald Trump owned golf course in Virginia that reads like a 5th grader's padded three-page report:

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot. The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”

The redundancy is making my eyes bleed... it had to have been written by the man himself. He also seems to think that Thulsa Doom was a Union general:

Among the Republican base, the Civil War is better known as the War of Stygian Aggression.

Monday, May 1, 2017

I often post about my beloved co-workers Fred and Ginger, who make up our Rodent Abatement Team. Over the weekend, they were on special assignment in one of our buildings, in which there was evidence of at least one unwanted tenant. On Saturday, I arrived at work and let the two of them out so I could give them their customary can of catfood (each one gets half a can in the morning and half a can in the evening), and I noticed that they had been hard at work... there were the remains of a Rattus norvegicus, but not a Rattus Norvegicus just inside the doorway. Lovely... the carcass of the rat was reduced to a semblance of a muroidPenanggalan. I grabbed a stick and batted the remains of the critter outside, so the clean-up crew could dispose of them, while sharing in the ratty bounty.

I made sure to praise my feline co-workers, and after feeding and brushing them, we went on a nice walkabout. Their methods are gruesome but not unsound, and for a couple of straight-up killers, they sure are pretty:

About Me

The Big Bad Bald Bastard is a character played by Monsieur _______ of the City of Y______. The role of the Bastard is a handy one to play on subways, walking the streets, and in dive-bars, when being a nerdy, bookish sort is not to one's advantage.